What is it about?
In this study, we tested whether people were more or less distracted after being interrupted by a person or a robot. Our participants included people with and without autism, as we predicted that people with autism would find the robot less distracting than the human.
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Photo by Taiki Ishikawa on Unsplash
Why is it important?
The study is important, as much of the existing research of robots and autism focus on children rather than adults. Adults with autism have difficulties finding and maintaining employment, so our experiment simulated a typical office environment, with the robot role-playing a colleague. So, as well as focussing on adults rather than children, the study also offers some insights to the challenges individual's with autism face in the workplace.
Perspectives
Interruptions provide insight to how people cope with switching tasks, something that is known to be challenging for people with autism. We were not able to demonstrate the benefits of a robot in this context, but argue that our results reflect our small sample size and task protocol. On the latter, we informed participants that they would be asked to switch from one task to another, thought on reflection, this should have been kept a surprise. Plans to refine the experiment with a larger sample are in development.
Peter McKenna
Heriot-Watt University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: "Sorry to Disturb You", March 2020, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3371382.3378340.
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